1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communication systems and more particularly, to a system and method of processing mobile station requests for contents stored on a web server in a wireless communication network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Remote communication with individuals has become increasingly important in a mobile society. Early versions of wireless devices transmitted a signal to a paging device worn by the user. The paging device did little more than provide a beep indicating that a message had been sent to the user. The user must then call a telephone number to receive the actual message. These early paging devices were replaced with text messaging devices that include a small display that permits the transmission of a text message, such as the message sender's telephone number. While the text messaging device provided additional data to the user, the user still had to use a separate telephone to contact the message sender, or to take action in accordance with the message.
With the advent of wireless communications networks, a user can simply call any telephone number on his cellular phone from virtually anywhere and once connected, speak directly to another party. Some cellular “phones” are even capable of transmitting and receiving data through an air link. These “phones,” more properly named as mobile stations, operate as mobile terminals have features similar to those of desktop computer terminals, features such as, for example, the ability to access stock quotes, weather, and e-mail messages through the Internet. Typical mobile stations, however, have less powerful processors and memories than those of desktop terminals because they have severe size and power consumption constraints. The amount of data and the reliability of data transmission are also limited by the available spectrum, i.e., the radio resources allotted to the mobile station.
Prior art systems require the terminals including mobile stations to perform a variety of tasks while communicating with a web (or origin) server, much like the desktop terminals. Such tasks include processing of redirection messages from web servers, i.e., messages redirecting the “user agents” (e.g., web browsers) of the mobile stations to new locations to which the requested resources or contents have been moved. The location of a content or a resource on the Internet is identified by what is known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL), a global address of documents and resources on the World Wide Web. A URL has two parts, the first part specifying the protocol or scheme (e.g. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or File Transfer Protocol (FTP)) used for fetching the content and the second part specifies the address or location of the content. Thus, for example, when a mobile station accesses a content that has been moved, the web server sends an HTTP redirection message to a gateway server indicating the new location of the requested content. The gateway server then sends a message encoded according to the Wireless Application Protocol to the mobile station through the wireless portion of the network. Once the mobile station receives the redirection message, its web browser automatically sends a new WAP encoded request to the gateway server which decodes the request and generates a new URL request identifying the new location.
These tasks, however, waste valuable radio resources in the wireless network. There is accordingly a need for a system and method that minimizes usage of radio resources while a mobile station is communicating with a web server.